Letters: Recycling oops

Recycling oops

Oops: You were in a rush and returned those library books to Grove library by dropping them in the big locked yellow mailbox outside the entrance, not noticing it said, "Eyeglasses and Hearing Aids.” Bigger oops: Your child deposited your cell phone in the big blue locked box outside Ludwick Eye Center. Perhaps the biggest oops: You were so excited to have acquired your new glasses and, knowing your old pair might bring better vision to someone else, you dropped them in the locked blue Lions Recycle for Sight box outside myeyeDr. Except, you made a mistake and dropped in your new glasses. What to do?

All of these examples are based on true incidents. The Chambersburg Evening Lions Club sponsors several collection sites in Franklin County for recycling of eyeglasses and hearing aids. Three of our sites feature large locked "mail box" type containers with our Lions' logo and printed identification as a recycle box. Glasses and hearing aids are collected twice a month, sorted, counted, and packaged for delivery to the New Jersey Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center or the Pittsburgh, where they will be distributed by mission trips to those in need. Our club has been doing this for several decades and has recycled nearly 80,000 pairs of glasses. Our recycling of hearing aids began more recently and donations are growing as the community responds. Helping those less fortunate is one of the ways Evening Lions serve our world community.

So - "what to do, if there is an oops"? Each locked collection box and cardboard container has an information label explaining how your donation of eyeglasses and hearing aids helps improve the life of someone in need and an email address for our club as well as a local telephone number for our Chambersburg Evening Lions Club recycle coordinator -- who has a key to open the locked boxes. However, each of the sites where those locked boxes are located should also have a key to open the box, so contact them first. And, please continue to deposit your used eyeglasses and hearing aids at our collection sites to help those in need.

Merrilynn Kessler

Chambersburg Evening Lions Club

Eyeglasses/Hearing Aids Coordinator

Renewable energy

While the debate about health care was in full swing in the Senate of the US Congress and in many, many homes throughout the country, Congress was also taking actions on other matters. On July 27, 2017 the House enacted a bill, H.R. 3219 called the "Making America Secure Again Act."

The general purpose of this bill as stated in its preamble is “Making appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2018...”
As an activist on the matter of climate change I was very upset though , that in the last days before the vote an addition to the bill and its title were made that has nothing to do with national defense. They run contrary to the notion of protecting us and future generations from the effects of climate change and also diminish our capacity to be competitive with our products on the international market.
The section that was inserted into the bill is called “Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy,” a program conducted by the Department of Energy (not Defense). In comparison to the appropriations for the previous year the House decided to slash the programs by 45 percent except for those that support fossil fuel energy research and development. The result is that many research programs in renewable energies and efficiency will be terminated.
On one hand we all want to have a great America, but on the other hand the House proposes to drastically slash programs that will keep us competitive on the international energy market. These programs would have provided new and well-paying jobs for American workers.
Norway, France, The United Kingdom, and India have already decided to phase out gas and diesel cars in the coming decades. The car company Volvo announced that "all the models it introduces starting in 2019 will be either hybrids or powered solely by batteries."
In 2016, 80% of all solar panels were installed outside the U.S. with over half of them in China alone. The amount of electricity generated from solar panels in Germany exceeds that of the entire United States.
Thanks to Tesla and Panasonic, a Giga factory has now started production of Lithium-Ion batteries for the energy storage market. In 2017 alone, Tesla and Panasonic will hire several thousand local employees and at peak production, the Giga factory will directly employ 6,500 people and indirectly create between 20,000 and 30,000 additional jobs in the surrounding regions. But Lithium, although not rare, is found only in a few countries and only a single mine in the U.S. exists. In many countries research is conducted to develop significantly cheaper and better batteries. Do we want to lag behind ?
Of course, the federal government cannot and should not provide everything desirable. However, it would be awfully nice to develop more jobs in the renewable energy sector in case all those hundreds of jobs in the warehouse businesses along the Route 81 corridor fall by the wayside because of automation. In addition, creation of renewable energy jobs would be a small contribution to the preservation of planet earth as we know it. Future generations will thank us for that.Zig Herzog, Fayetteville
Volunteer, CitizensClimateLobby.org